Introducing PrimeDAO
Today The Prime Development Foundation announces PrimeDAO — a collective of experienced builders committed to the systemic advancement of Open Finance.
A new system of Open Finance (DeFi), based on programmable money is being realized on Ethereum, a blockchain smart contract platform for decentralized applications (dApps). DeFi allows for complex financial transactions without the need to rely on centralized infrastructures, instead, letting users anywhere verify and trust the code themselves.
We are currently in the early days of DeFi and have the potential to transform global finance for the better or worse, depending on which trajectories the DeFi ecosystem coordinates around and steers towards. Although fully interoperable dApps can coordinate without friction, its builder individuals and groups cannot. In DeFi, such coordination frictions have resulted in many inefficiencies such as security risks, hacks, underfunded teams, and outright Ponzi schemes dominating the market. This limits the pace of innovation and the industry’s overall potential.
To help solve these coordination problems, we introduce PrimeDAO,* whose mission is to:
Facilitate wide adoption of Open Finance by coordinating and cultivating projects that promote safety, reliability, liquidity, and open access, while avoiding centralized appropriation of critical financial infrastructure through decentralized governance.
* If the link doesn’t work, install/turn on Metamask and go to primedao.eth or visit primedao.io
🦾 Orchestrating Systemic Innovation
For many projects in the DeFi space, developing secure frontier technology is challenging enough. In the absence of a well-funded foundation, many projects have insufficient resources to properly develop, administer, and expand their offering towards mass adoption.
PrimeDAO will cultivate a competent and well-funded builder community, establish coordination mechanisms that sustain ongoing operations, and become a much-needed DeFi Schelling point. The DAO’s goal is to produce and maintain a community-owned set of products and services everyone can access and benefit from — both early and mass adopters!
PrimeDAO will initially prioritize projects addressing issues in four critical areas:
- Liquidity: In DeFi, liquidity must be efficiently utilized such that slippage and user experience are on par with centralized exchanges. Aggregation and layer-2 technologies available today provide powerful tools that realize economies of scale. PrimeDAO’s first product is a liquidity aggregator that provides best-price discovery, slippage reduction, and reliable settlement.
- Safety: Smart contracts need to be less exploitable than centralized exchanges and must function as intended under all circumstances (e.g. network congestion, rapid market movements). Cross-project audits, increased integration testing, ecosystem bug bounties, and insurance mechanisms can improve overall safety and confidence. As one of its first products, PrimeDAO will prioritize creating a decentralized DeFi Safety Interface that informs and guides DeFi adopters.
- Reliability: Price feed accuracy and transaction settlement success rates must be on par with those of centralized exchanges. When things go wrong, consensus decisions on remedies must swiftly be enacted so that mainstream users feel as secure as they would using a centralized exchange.
- Governance: PrimeDAO will govern and allocate resources towards contributors for building, auditing, and maintaining its DeFi mechanisms and products. PrimeDAO aims to form a widely networked organization of interlinked DAOs, builder teams, and key individuals that efficiently coordinate systemic DeFi advancement, forming a sustainable home and neighborhood for DeFi builders and enthusiasts.
🌊 First Product: Liquidity Aggregator
One big challenge with Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) today is the lack of liquidity for many tokens, which results in significant trade slippage. The fragmentation of liquidity across several independent DEXs exacerbates this issue. One solution to this problem is to split a large trade into smaller pieces, which settle on different DEXs. This achieves a lower overall slippage and significantly better price than just using a single DEX. This technique, which makes the fragmented liquidity pools appear as a single large liquidity pool, is known as aggregation.
DEX aggregators, also known as smart routers, are critical infrastructure for DeFi and the Ethereum ecosystem at-large. To this end, PrimeDAO’s first product is a DEX aggregator that provides best-price discovery, slippage reduction, and reliable settlement. It is a licensed version of the Totle aggregator, provided to PrimeDAO as its first product.
From day one, the Prime Aggregator will be integrated with a variety of DEX types and DeFI protocols. Soon after the DAO’s launch, the router’s parameters will be governed by the DAO, including its fee structure and whitelisted liquidity sources.
🤖 Call For Collaborators
PrimeDAO is a coordination engine for systemic DeFi advancement. While its first iteration revolves around its first product — the liquidity aggregator — its product horizon is near-endless for its formative builder collective. To this end, PrimeDAO is actively looking for individuals, builder squads, and DAOs who want to partner to move Open Finance forward in a safe and inclusive fashion.
👷🏻♀️ Technical and ecosystem builders who want to create proposals to PrimeDAO should join Discord and introduce themselves in #contribute. Perspective builders are invited to check out the product and squad channels as well!
🏗 Open Finance products and protocols that would like to decentralize their governance with PrimeDAO should do the same.
💸 In the future, PrimeDAO will host a token sale. Funds and token sale participants who want to get involved can share their enthusiasm in the #prime-token chat on Discord. DAOs and other DeFi projects or protocols interested in partnering, perhaps even swapping tokens with PrimeDAO, should similarly introduce themselves. More details on the PRIME distribution will be shared in a future blog post.
📄 Litepaper
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💬 Discord
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🕸 Website — If the link doesn’t work, install/turn on Metamask and go to primedao.eth or visit primedao.io
